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MRU Tabs0.1.1-signed.1-signed

Alters the Ctrl+Tab hotkeys so that they cycle through all tabs in the order of their activation recency, much like the Alt+Tab hotkey does on the operating system level. When the active tab is closed, the most-recently active tab is selected.

About this Add-on

Important update: This add-on is no longer maintained. It reached a reliability of maybe 99% when it was first created, but at some Firefox version, reliability decreased to an unacceptable level. I no longer use this add-on myself. There is a better alternative: Go to about:config, search for "browser.ctrlTab.previews" and set the value to "true". This enables MRU Ctrl+Tab switching. It doesn't do live tab switching but comes with a preview window instead. The window only appears after a short delay so if you're quick to switch back and forth between two tabs only, you won't even see that window.

Update as of 2017-04-25: It seems that Firefox 53 has this option on the surface. Just go to your Firefox settings, on the General page, under the Tabs section, and set the option appropriately. Thank you Mozilla, this is how it was supposed to be from the start.

I was a long-time user of the LastTab add-on that provided the same functionality and more. It broke with Firefox 20 and will be unrecoverably incompatible with Firefox 21. As I needed a replacement to fix the order in which Ctrl+Tab cycles through the tabs, I created this little add-on. It does the following:

Switch through tabs in most-recently-used order with Ctrl+Tab

Reverse direction with Ctrl+Shift+Tab

Activates the most-recently-used tab when closing the active tab

Known issues:

Due to missing features in the add-on SDK, this currently only works well for a single browser window. I haven't really tested it with multiple windows but I expect no reasonable behaviour. It's good enough for me because I always keep a single window anyway.

I also noticed that when another tab is selected automatically, the default tab (the one directly right of the previous one) is still selected but then the "correct" tab is selected quickly afterwards. During high system load this may lead to some tab flickering. Also, after restarting Firefox with session restoring, this default selection change leads to loading the tab page even if the user didn't want to select and load it. I assume that the shortly selected tab also receives focus and page visibility events. This could all be resolved by preventing the default tab switch which is not offered by the add-on SDK.

The source code is quite simple and BSD-licensed. You can browse it in the add-on builder if you like. Any coding help is appreciated, this is my first work using the add-on SDK and I'm no Mozilla code expert either.